What Are The Chances?

Did you ever stop to think how often things happen in life just by chance, and what might have happened if they didn’t? What if you hadn’t driven through an intersection on a green light, like you do every other day of the week? Would that careless driver texting on their phone and running the red light have hit somebody else? What if you decided not to attend that evening class on American sign language? Would you have still met the man or woman sitting next to you who you would spend the rest of your life with? Does fate determine the paths we take in life, or is it all just a crapshoot?

Consider the case of Willis Meadows, a young man full of fervor to defend his homeland, who enlisted in Company G of the 37th Alabama Volunteer Infantry along with his brothers and cousins during the Civil War. Meadows’ unit was sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi on the war’s Western Front. In the days before highways and railroads, most of the material and goods shipped around the country traveled by water, and the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg occupied a strategic position along the Mississippi River. Nothing could go north or south along the river without coming under the deadly guns of Vicksburg, and it was vital to the Union war effort to seize control of the city.

In May of 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant laid siege to Vicksburg after his troops were repelled when they tried to take the town. It was a long, deadly affair that lasted 47 days. By the time Vicksburg finally fell, the residents were starving and reduced to eating stray dogs when they could find nothing else to fill their empty stomachs.

Willis Meadows had grown up hunting to provide for his family and was an excellent shot, which resulted in him being assigned the role of a sniper to take out Union troops who ventured into range of his rifle. That assignment set the stage for what would happen on July 1st of that year. Meadows had secreted himself behind an iron boiler plate with a peephole through which he could see the enemy. At the time, he didn’t know that three soldiers from Company H of the Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry had been sent out with orders to kill any Confederate snipers they could find.

Among those soldiers was 21-year-old Peter Knapp, himself an expert shot. He spotted Meadows’ position and fired a single shot directly through the peephole and into the right eye of the 19-year-old rebel soldier. The chances of Knapp being able to make such a difficult shot were astronomical.

Knocked unconscious by the bullets’ impact, Meadows appeared to be dead and was left where he fell. It was sometime later before another Union soldier saw him and realized he was still alive. He was brought to the Union lines, where surgeons tried to extract the bullet before realizing it was so close to his brain that it was too dangerous to operate. Transported to an army hospital further behind the lines, nobody expected him to survive. But through some miracle, he did, and eventually he was transferred to a Confederate hospital in a prisoner exchange, where he spent the rest of the war.

Meanwhile, Vicksburg finally fell to Grant’s forces on July 4th, three days after Meadows was wounded. Peter Knapp, the young soldier who had shot him, went on to fight in other battles before eventually being captured that November at Missionary Ridge during the Chattanooga campaign. He was sent to the notorious Confederate prison of Andersonville in Georgia.

When the war finally ended, both men went back to civilian life. Meadows returned to his farm in Alabama, later marrying and living a full life in spite of his disability. For his part, Knapp spent some time farming in Michigan before moving to Kelso, Washington. That should be the end of the story, but it wasn’t.

In 1921, 58 years after he was wounded, Willis Meadows was sitting at his kitchen table when he had a coughing episode. Remarkably, the one-ounce bullet that he had carried in his head for all that time had somehow migrated to his throat and was coughed up onto the table. Newspapers all over the country carried the story of the Confederate veteran who had amazingly coughed up a Union bullet so long after the last shots of the war had been fired.

Among those who read the story was Peter Knapp, the one who had fired the shot that wounded Meadows. What were the chances? He contacted Meadows, confirmed the time and details of the shooting, and the two men who had been mortal enemies, ready to kill each other so long ago, became friends. They remained in contact with each other for the rest of their lives, exchanging letters and photographs and sharing information about their lives and their families.

Peter Knapp died peacefully in Oregon on April 13th, 1924. He was cremated, and when his wife Georgianna died six years later, she was also cremated. Willis Meadows outlived him by three years, dying on October 10, 1927, and is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Lanett, Alabama.

You would think that would be the end of their strange story, but it wasn’t. In 2012, a woman named Alice Knapp was doing genealogical research on her husband’s family when she by chance happened upon a story about his ancestor and the Vicksburg shooting. She was shocked to learn that Peter Knapp and his wife’s ashes had never been claimed and were still in storage at a Portland crematorium. She arranged to claim them and the Union veteran was buried with his wife at the Willamette National Cemetery, with full military honors. I hope both old soldiers are resting in peace.

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And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. – Douglas MacArthur